Excavating Unearthed Arcana that Didn’t Make the Cut, Part 4

Courtesy of the Dungeons & Dragons design team’s plethora of Unearthed Arcana playtest documents over the years we’ve seen a ton of new character options evolve from initial concepts into their final versions in official published products. Each Unearthed Arcana follows up with a survey for players to weigh in with their thoughts and impressions, which the team uses to guide further development. Some remain largely the same, some change drastically and many don’t pass this playtest stage. At this point quite a few subclasses, feats and other 5E D&D character options fall into the latter category. Curious what didn’t make the cut? Let’s get into it.

Unearthed Arcana written in pencil, not ink

According to the very first Unearthed Arcana document for 5E D&D these documents are a “workshop where D&D R&D shows off a
variety of new and interesting pieces of RPG design for use at your gaming table. You can think of the material presented in this series as similar to the first wave of the fifth edition playtest. These game mechanics are in draft form, usable in your campaign but not fully tempered by playtests and design iterations. They are highly volatile and might be unstable; if you use them, be ready to rule on any issues
that come up. They’re written in pencil, not ink.”

“The material presented in Unearthed Arcana will range from mechanics that we expect one day to publish in a supplement to house rules from our home campaigns that we want to share, from core system options such as mass combat to setting-specific material such as the Eberron update included in this article. Once it’s out there, you can expect us to check in with you to see how it’s working out and what we can do to improve it.” — from Unearthed Arcana: Eberron

In Part 1 of this series I turned this into a series because frankly there’s a lot more 5E D&D Unearthed Arcanas than I thought. Starting with Unearthed Arcana: Eberron I hit all the playtest packets with character options as yet unseen in an official product. I made it through to the end of 2015’s Light, Dark, Underdark! Here in Part 4 I’m picking up with one that calls back to the early days of 5E D&D’s design direction.

Unearthed Arcana: Feats for Skills

Back when 5E D&D was simply D&D Next the big marketing push was modularity. Various components of the game would be presented as modules for players to mix, match and add to their games as they saw fit. This Unearthed Arcana harkens to this earlier time with an expansion for the optional feats system. Here we get a whole bunch of feats related to various skills, which expand on their use with special features and a bonus to the ability score they’re tied to by default.

Unearthed Arcana: Feats for Races

I was a huge fan of racial paragon prestige classes in 3.5 D&D and I’m equally enamored of racial feats in 5E D&D so this is right up my alley. Many of the feats in this Unearthed Arcana found their way into official material but a few did not. One standout to me is Human Determination because I came up with my own feat for humans called Fake It Till You Make It. When I covered the Top 10 Homebrew Feats I came across a treasure trove of racial feats created by former D&D Beyond lead Adam Bradford too. If you’re into racial feats like I am you’ll probably dig them quite a bit.

Unearthed Arcana: Elf Subraces

If there’s one thing D&D doesn’t have enough of it’s different varieties of elves, right? Half of the options in this Unearthed Arcana have since become official 5E D&D character options. The other half didn’t pass muster. My suspicion is reaction to the grugach was largely, “Don’t we already have wood elves?” As to the avariel frankly I am surprised this didn’t move forward because it’s different enough. On the other hand there’s already so many elves and also I know lots of people hate fun (I mean dislike flying characters). Perhaps the owlin took the slot for a new flying race?

Unearthed Arcana: Three Subclasses

Oh boy did I absolutely fall in love with Circle of Spores druid from this one. I played a svirfneblin from this Druid Circle for almost two years in a live stream game exploring the dungeon beneath Castle Greyhawk and it was awesome. Definitely one of my very favorite characters ever. This character option became official years ago while the other two in this Unearthed Arcana did not. First up is the Brute Martial Archetype, which is exactly what it sounds like — a fighter who hits really hard and can get hit really hard and keep on going. The other one is School of Invention for wizards. It would be another year and a half before Eberron: Rising from the Last War released and brought the artificer to 5E D&D so WotC was still tinkering around with those concepts here. Artificer is far from my favorite class but I do prefer it as a distinct class of its own. If you fancy the concept as more of an Arcane Tradition you may enjoy this one quite a lot.

Unearthed Arcana: Giant Soul Sorcerer

I can’t for the life of me figure out why this character options never moved forward. Failure to reach the minimum positive response in surveys is the parameters of course but I have a hard time believing that’s all there was to this Unearthed Arcana. People went ape for this as I recall and looking it over again now it’s not hard to imagine why. These features don’t even seem overly powerful to me, a factor I could understand playing a role in stalling further development. This concept wasn’t even revisited in the very recent Unearthed Arcana 2022 — Giant Options, which is really weird to me since sorcerers’ whole jam is manifesting magic through the strange power of their bloodline.

Unearthed Arcana: Races of Ravnica

Elephant people, mutants and whatever the heck vedalken are supposed to be all make it through but basically velociraptor people don’t? What is this multiverse coming to. I want to say there’s a version of viashino in one of the free Plane Shift documents we covered here on the site too. My knowledge of these reptilians is pretty limited but they do make a major impact in my Rust Monster themed Magic: The Gathering deck.

Unearthed Arcana: Dragonmarks

Most of my Eberron knowledge stems from the Dungeons & Dragons Online MMO where dragonmarks are a feat option for characters. In 5E D&D they appear as variants for whatever race each dragonmark is tied to like halflings and their Mark of Hospitality. This Unearthed Arcana presents the concept this way as well and that’s how they are presented as official character options too. But there’s an extra bit of development here with Greater Dragonmark, a feat to expand on an existing Dragonmark.

We’re through 2018 in this series with so much still left to go! There’s so many of them even skipping the ones without character options I’m maybe through half of them in this post. Seriously there’s over a dozen more from this year alone. Part 5 of this series begins with yet another take on a noodly character option for 5E D&D and no it’s not the Mystic. Later installments of this series will include links to previous posts, and they’re all included in our Blast from the Past category too.

• Excavating Unearthed Arcana that Didn’t Make the Cut, Part 1
• Excavating Unearthed Arcana that Didn’t Make the Cut, Part 2
• Excavating Unearthed Arcana that Didn’t Make the Cut, Part 3
• Excavating Unearthed Arcana that Didn’t Make the Cut, Part 4
• Excavating Unearthed Arcana that Didn’t Make the Cut, Part 5

*Featured image — Jeff Easley painted the Last Spell as the cover image for 1985’s Unearthed Arcana book for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. [Image courtesy Wizards of the Coast]

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